Take Your Tree to Unreal

The routes from Natsura to Unreal: Nanite Skeletal Assemblies, wind, Houdini Engine, and what is planned for LODs.

Natsura trees go to Unreal as Nanite Skeletal Assemblies: rigged, skinned, instanced, and with wind. This page points to everything Unreal-related in the docs.

Three oaks exported from Natsura, standing in an Unreal level

Nanite Skeletal Assemblies

A Natsura tree in Unreal's Nanite view

The main route. One export sends a tree, or a whole library of trees, to Unreal with its instances, materials and wind.

See Nanite Skeletal Assemblies, and Nanite Troubleshooting if something doesn't come across.

Wind

Three Wind Config layers on a tree in Houdini

Wind Config splits the tree into layers, and the export turns them into Unreal's Dynamic Wind.

See Wind for Unreal.

Houdini Engine

Houdini Engine isn't fully supported yet. In Project Elderwood, tools built with Natsura ran live inside Unreal for authoring foliage in the engine. More information is coming soon.

LODs

The export writes Nanite Skeletal Assemblies only. LODs for traditional pipelines are planned, and you can follow them on the roadmap.

Learning

A Nanite pine forest in Unreal

Nanite Assemblies shows the export on screen, and Send a Forest to Unreal covers exporting at forest scale.

Assembly Workflow

Build a library of rigged parts with Assembly Resource, place it on a tree with Assembly Decoration, choose which part goes where with traits, and pose the parts with effectors while they stay instances.

Wind for Unreal

How Wind Config splits a Natsura tree into wind layers, and how the export turns them into Unreal's Dynamic Wind.